A Paradise of Bachelors: Remodeling Domesticity and Masculinity in the Turn-of-the-Century New York Bachelor Apartment

Abstract

For both herman melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the quin-tessence of midcentury bachelor life was found across the Atlantic. Attempting to capitalize on the phenomenal success of Donald Grant Mitchell'sReveries of a Bachelor(1850), Melville in 1855 published “The Paradise of Bachelors,” with its companion sketch, “The Tartarus of Maids,” inHarper's(during Mitchell's tenure there as editor). This diptych juxtaposed the hard labor of unmarried New England female millworkers to the leisurely pleasures of English bachelor residents of the Inns of Court. For Melville, the “quiet absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk” was epitomized by bachelor life in London. Hawthorne made his own entry in the bachelor sweepstakes withThe Blithedale Romance(1852), which portrayed the temporary residence of the bachelor Coverdale in an American Utopian community and an urban hotel. Yet Hawthorne, like Melville, associated ideal bachelor life with London. Describing a dinner he had enjoyed at the Reform Club, Hawthorne noted in his journal that “there are rooms and conveniences for every possible purpose, and whatever material for enjoyment a bachelor may need, or ought to have, he can surely find it here.”